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3 idiots

The cartoon on the right depicts that there are 3 persons on a construction site trying to cross over from one beam to other with only one prop and that is a pole. 

Classical Approach

This is one of the best example of teamwork. It is clearly visible in the cartoon that each one is in a vulnerable position in one instance and the other two is carrying him/her. We can infer that in a team, there is a high probability of one of the team being in a vulnerable situation and that is where the teamwork comes in. The team should help their team member in the time of difficulty.

The situation can further be dissected and analyzed with 9 situation:

Front Leading person is A, Middle person is B, and Last person is C. 

	Each Persons Moving Position	Person - C	Person - B	Person - A
1	^^^	1C Safe	1B Safe	1A Safe
2	^^^	2C Pull Down Safe	2B Fulcrum Safe	2A Half Safe
3	^^^	3C Pull Down Safe	3B Fulcrum Safe	3A Hanging in AIR - UNSAFE
4	^^^	4C	4B Fulcrum & Halfsafe	4A Half Safe Pull down
5	^^^	5C Carry Safe	5B Hanging in  AIR  UNSAFE	5A Carry  Safe
6	^^^	6C Half safe	6B Fulcrum & Half Safe	6A Pull Down Safe
7	^^^	7C Hangingin AIR  UNSAFE	7B Fulcrum	7A Pull Down Safe
8	^^^	8C Half Safe	8B Fulcrum Safe	8A Pull Down Safe
9	^^^	9C	9B	9A
		Safe	Safe	Safe

So, broadly there can be 4 situations

Safety	Situation A	Situation B	Situation C	Situation D
Safe	0	3	6	9
Half safe	0	3	2	0
Unsafe	9	3	1	0

Situation A is the worst possible and situation D is the best possible. So, our aim is to travel from situation A to Situation D by exercising excellent management skills.

Distributive Leadership

Here the concept of distributive leadership can be understood. As the person leading from the front can be considered as leader initially, but as his position becomes vulnerable next person should take on the leadership and it can be further passed on. So, every person in this team should have quality of a leader and should also have the tendency to take over. This can be related to flat management style with no hierarchy and everyone can assume the leadership.

Pre-planned exercise

Another perspective here can be that the crossing may be planned in such a manner that the team can cross over with just following standard procedure. The procedures should be extremely clear and to the point, in order to follow without hesitation or ambiguity. 

Our Take in Class

Attended my first lecture by Alumni @ NITIE

Before coming here, I heard a lot from many of my friends from IIMs and ISB that the alumni base of NITIE is the best and after coming here I realized why. The two revered ones were:
1. Nikhil Kulkarni, Manager, KPMG India
2. Hemant Kumar Jain, Manager, KPMG India

Entrepreneurship vs Job

After introduction and various questions thrown from our side, the talk began.

"Entrepreneurship is the act and art of being an entrepreneur or one who undertakes innovations or introducing new things, finance and business acumen, in an effort to transform innovations into economic goods."

"A job is a regular activity performed in exchange for payment."

But these definition has nothing to do with what you can do in a job or by being an entrepreneur. In today's scenario everyone entering an esteemed MBA college wants to be an entrepreneur without knowing anything about the opportunities and risks involved in it. So it is very important to clear the confusion around it. The question which is significant over here is not about being an entrepreneur or going for a job, rather what you want from that. If you have a unique idea and you think you can work it out into a business idea, then you can think of entrepreneurship. On the other hand, if you want to innovate, work in a stimulating environment, don't want to work under many restrictions, don't want to do a job which is mechanical in nature and other similar reasons, don't go for entrepreneurship. A right job can provide a lot of the above things without making you an entrepreneur. A very apt question came out on the table, "Rather than working for a multinational company one can work for the country by starting an enterprise". But this thought is quite shallow because one should consider oneself as a global citizen and should work for humanity. When one starts an enterprise, you can't work freely as there are various rules and regulation to be followed to start a company and also one should have proper funding which is not that easy to get in present time. So, unless you have that burning idea to take you to the other side, don't just follow entrepreneurship for the sake of it. But if you have that thing burning inside you don't stop for anything in the world.

MastishK

It is India's first online business game to be started by our two guest lecturers. This was a new idea that convinced them that they can go all the way with it and they started it and excelled it.

So, don't follow entrepreneurship follow your idea. 

Human Relations Theories

George Elton Mayo was an Australian psychologist, sociologist and organization theorist. He is known as the founder of the Human Relations Movement, and was known for his research including the Hawthorne Studies

Mayo stressed the following:

1. Natural groups, in which social aspects take precedence over functional organizational structures.
2. Upwards communication, by which communication is two way, from worker to chief executive, as well as vice versa.
3. Cohesive and good leadership is needed to communicate goals and to ensure effective and coherent decision making.^[1]

It has become a concern of many companies to improve the job-oriented interpersonal skills of employees. The teaching of these skills to employees is referred to as "soft skills" training. Companies need their employees to be able to successfully communicate and convey information, to be able to interpret others' emotions, to be open to others' feelings, and to be able to solve conflicts and arrive at resolutions. By acquiring these skills, the employees, those in management positions, and the customer can maintain more compatible relationships.

Hawthorne Studies

The ground-breaking Hawthorne studies carried out in the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company (USA) 1927 - 32.

Stage 1 (1924 -27): Study of the physical surroundings (lighting level) on productivity of workers. Control group and experimental group previously had similar productivity before study began

Control Group = constant lighting level, Experimental Group = varied lighting level

Result: Both groups productivity increased - even when experimental group was working in dim light

Stage 2 (1927 - 29): 'Relay assembly room stage' -- Still analysing effect of physical surroundings (rest, pauses, lunch break duration, length of working week) on output.

Result: Output increased even when worsening conditions -- Hypothesis was now that it was the attitudes of subjects at work and not the physical conditions. This gave rise to the 'Hawthorne Effect' - employees were responding not so much to changes in the environment as to the fact they were the centre of attention - a special group.

Stage 3 (1928 - 30): A Total of 20,000 interviews were collected with the workers on employee attitudes to working conditions, their supervision and their jobs.

Stage 4 (1932): 'Bank winning observation room' -- This time the new subjects (14 men) put in separate room for six months

Result: Productivity restricted due to pressure from peers to adopt a slower rate to circumvent company wages incentive scheme to generally adopt own group rules and behaviour.

Matrix management is the practice of managing individuals with more than one reporting line (in a matrix organization structure), but it is also commonly used to describe managing cross functional, cross business group and other forms of working that cross the traditional vertical business units.

Classical Management theories

There are three eminent people who contributed a lot to the classical management theory:

1. Henri Fayol
2. Fredrick Taylor
3. Max Weber

Henri Fayol was a French mining engineer and director of mines who developed a general theory of business administration. He and his colleagues developed this theory independently of scientific management but roughly contemporaneously. He was one of the most influential contributors to modern concepts of management. Fayol's work was one of the first comprehensive statements of a general theory of management.He proposed that there were six primary functions of management and 14 principles of management. Functions of management

1. to forecast and plan,
2. to organize
3. to command or direct
4. to coordinate
5. to develop output
6. to control

14 principles of Management

1. Division of work. Work should be divided among individuals and groups to ensure that effort and attention are focused on special portions of the task. Fayol presented work specialization as the best way to use the human resources of the organization.
2. Authority. Managers must be able to give orders. Authority gives them this right. Note that responsibility arises wherever authority is exercised.
3. Discipline. Employees must obey and respect the rules that govern the organization. Good discipline is the result of effective leadership, a clear understanding between management and workers regarding the organization's rules, and the judicious use of penalties for infractions of the rules.
4. Unity of command. Every employee should receive orders from only one superior.
5. Unity of direction. Each group of organisational activities that have the same objective should be directed by one manager using one plan.
6. Subordination of individual interests to the general interest. The interests of any one employee or group of employees should not take precedence over the interests of the organization as a whole.
7. Remuneration. Workers must be paid a fair wage for their services.
8. Centralisation. Centralisation refers to the degree to which subordinates are involved in decision making. Whether decision making is centralized (to management) or decentralized (to subordinates) is a question of proper proportion. The task is to find the optimum degree of centralisation for each situation.
9. Scalar chain. The line of authority from top management to the lowest ranks represents the scalar chain. Communications should follow this chain. However, if following the chain creates delays, cross-communications can be allowed if agreed to by all parties and superiors are kept informed.
10. Order. People and materials should be in the right place at the right time.
11. Equity. Managers should be kind and fair to their subordinates.
12. Stability of tenure of personnel. High employee turnover is inefficient. Management should provide orderly personnel planning and ensure that replacements are available to fill vacancies.
13. Initiative. Employees who are allowed to originate and carry out plans will exert high levels of effort.
14. Esprit de corps. Promoting team spirit will build harmony and unity within the organization.

Frederick Winslow Taylor was an American mechanical engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency. He is regarded as the father of scientific management and was one of the first management consultants.Taylor was one of the intellectual leaders of the Efficiency Movement and his ideas, broadly conceived, were highly influential in the Progressive Era.

Taylor's scientific management consisted of four principles:

1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.
2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.
3. Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker's discrete task" (Montgomery 1997: 250).
4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks.

Taylor believed in transferring control from workers to management. He set out to increase the distinction between mental (planning work) and manual labor (executing work). Detailed plans specifying the job, and how it was to be done, were to be formulated by management and communicated to the workers.

Taylor thought that by analyzing work, the "One Best Way" to do it would be found. He is most remembered for developing the stopwatch time study, which combined with Frank Gilbreth's motion study methods later becomes the field of time and motion study. He would break a job into its component parts and measure each to the hundredth of a minute. One of his most famous studies involved shovels. He noticed that workers used the same shovel for all materials. He determined that the most effective load was 21½ lb, and found or designed shovels that for each material would scoop up that amount. He was generally unsuccessful in getting his concepts applied and was dismissed from Bethlehem Steel. Nevertheless, Taylor was able to convince workers who used shovels and whose compensation was tied to how much they produced to adopt his advice about the optimum way to shovel by breaking the movements down into their component elements and recommending better ways to perform these movements. It was largely through the efforts of his disciples (most notably H.L. Gantt) that industry came to implement his ideas. Moreover, the book he wrote after parting company with Bethlehem Steel, Shop Management, sold well.

Maximilian Karl Emil "Max" Weber was a German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist whose ideas influenced social theory, social research, and the entire discipline of sociology. Weber is often cited, with Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx, as among the three founding architects of sociology.

Bureaucracy in this context is the organisational form of certain dominant characteristics such as a hierarchy of authority and a system of rules. Bureaucracy in a sense of red tape or officialdom should not be used as these meanings are value-ridden and only emphasize very negative aspects of the original Max Weber model. Through analyses of organisations Weber identified three basic types of legitimate authority: Traditional, Charismatic, Rational-Legal. Authority has to be distinguished from power in this discussion. Power is a unilateral thing - it enables a person to force another to behave in a certain way, whether by means of strength or by rewards. Authority, on the other hand, implies acceptance of the rules by those over whom it is to be exercised within limits agreeable to the subordinates that Weber refers to in discussing legitimate authority.

Weber presented three types of legitimate authority:

Traditional authority: where acceptance of those in authority arose from tradition and custom.

Charismatic authority: where acceptance arises from loyalty to, and confidence in, the personal qualities of the ruler.

Rational-legal authority: where acceptance arises out of the office, or position, of the person in authority as bounded by the rules and procedures of the organization.

It is the rational-legal authority form that exists in most organisations today and this is the form to which Weber ascribed the term 'bureaucracy'.

The main features of bureaucracy according to Weber were:

• a continuous organisation or functions bounded by rules
• that individuals functioned within the limits of the specialisation of the work, the degree of authority allocated and the rules governing the exercise of authority
• a hierarchical structure of offices
• appointment to offices made on the grounds of technical competence only
• the separation of officials from the ownership of the organisation
• the authority was vested in the official positions and not in the personalities that held these posts. Rules, decisions and actions were formulated and recorded in writing.

Three Monks

Three Monks is a Chinese animated feature film produced by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio. After the cultural revolution and the fall of the political Gang of Four in 1976, the film was one of the first animations created as part of the rebirth period. It is also referred to as The Three Buddhist Priests.

The film is based on the ancient Chinese proverb "One monk will shoulder two buckets of water, two monks will share the load, but add a third and no one will want to fetch water."

A young monk lives a simple life in a temple on top of a hill. He has one daily task of hauling two buckets of water up the hill. He tries to share the job with another monk, but the carry pole is only long enough for one bucket. The arrival of a third monk prompts everyone to expect that someone else will take on the chore. Consequently, no one fetches water though everybody is thirsty. At night, a rat comes to scrounge and then knocks the candleholder, leading to a devastating fire in the temple. The three monks finally unite together and make a concerted effort to put out the fire. Since then they understand the old saying "unity is strength" and begin to live a harmonious life. The temple never lacks water again.

Analysis

So Lets take work done by one monk to fill two bucket and carry it to top as 1 unit or 1 joule.

1) One monk at the temple-

With one Pole and two buckets , first monk fetch water from pond.

Total Buckets carried = 2 , Total work done  = 1 unit 

2) Two monk at the temple-

Both monk firstly behave friendly but when they needed water , no one was ready to fetch it. So they come up with sharing of load , where 2 monk will carry only one bucket which will be in the exactly middle of the pole. So,
Total Buckets carried = 2 , Total work done  = .50 x 2 = 1 unit 

 

3) Three monk at the temple-

when third monk join them in temple , all three of them starts expecting from other 2 to bring water and so no one  fetches water. So in all work done is null.

Total Buckets carried = 0 , Total work done  = .0 unit 

 

4) Three monk at the temple(Solution)-

In crisis situation , All three make effort and with sharing of load , all 3 were able to fix the problem and also get united. So they come up with a solution for future and divide the work proportionately. So,

Total Buckets carried = 2 , Total work done  = .33 x 3 = 1 units

Result:- 

S. No.	Scenario	No of Monks	Total Buckets Carried	Total Work Done	Effort	Productivity
1	1 monk carrying 2 buckets	1	2	1	100	1%
2	2 monk carrying 1 buckets	2	2	1	50	1%
3	3 monk carrying no bucket	3	0	0	0	not defined
4	3 monk carrying 2 bucket	3	2	1	10	10%

Case 1 and 2 have equal productivity as a whole but in case 2 individual effort is less so it is better. In Case 4 there is much better productivity because of the use of pulleys and division of work than any other case. Case 3 is a worst scenario for an organization where employee expects from others to apply effort and get work done.

 

Understanding and Learning :-

• Unity - When there is oneness in a team, there is more strength in opinion, more strength in action, and more strength in character. This is a very simple and obvious fact that, if one person tries his hands on some job, he will manage much less than what a group effort will achieve.
• Division of work - Division of labour represents a qualitative increase in productivity. In a successful organization, work and labour is divided as per economic, technological and physical strength of individual. Such structured division lead to better performance.
• Teamwork - Team work is essential in corporates for better output and a better bonding among employees. In a team , workload is shared and individuals feel motivated to perform better than his team members.